The invention relates generally to mobile carts and more specifically to mobile medication carts for dispensing medication to patients in hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and/or other care facilities.
In the health care industry, an important component of patient care is providing and administering the proper medications and/or medical treatments, such as delivering drugs, applying or replacing bandages, treating wounds, and the like. Medications or treatments, in the form of pills (e.g., capsules, liquids, and the like), injections, inhalants, topical medications, bandages, and the like are given to patients to relieve pain, to prevent or eliminate infections, to care for wounds, to promote healing, and/or to treat illnesses and disease. Administering medications may involve delivering determined doses at specified intervals throughout the day and/or night over one or several days, weeks, or months depending on the condition being treated.
Some medications should not be taken together due to potential adverse reactions, or are carefully controlled because of their potential effect on the body or their potential for misuse or abuse. In addition, if the wrong medication is administered to a patient, or if the correct medication is given but in too large a dosage or too frequently, adverse effects may result. Accordingly, it is important that doctors, nurses, staff, management, and the like of hospitals and other care facilities (e.g., nursing homes) ensure that patients take only prescribed medications in accordance with their prescriptions. Usually, administrative controls and paper records, sometimes augmented by security measures, are used to achieve these objectives. However, due to the importance of properly administering the correct medications to the correct patient in the correct doses, there remains a need for improved methods of delivering medications to patients in a controlled manner.